Jay Chen, David Hutchful, William Thies, and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian March 2011

Abstract

While computers and Internet access have growing penetration amongst schools in the developing world, intermittent connectivity and limited bandwidth often prevent them from being fully utilized by students and teachers. In this paper, we make two contributions to help address this problem. First, we characterize six weeks of HTTP traﬃc from a primary school outside of Bangalore, India, illuminating opportunities and constraints for improving performance in such settings. Second, we deploy an aggressive caching and prefetching engine and show that it accelerates a user’s overall browsing experience (apart from video content) by 2.8x. Unlike proxy-based techniques, our system is bundled as an open-source Firefox plugin and runs directly on client machines. This allows easy installation and conﬁguration by end users, which is especially important in developing regions where a lack of permissions or technical expertise often prevents modiﬁcation of internal network settings.